Covering a randomly selected song every day for a year, between my 39th and 40th birthdays.
FOR GREAT JUSTICE!

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Tuesday, November 16, 2010

243. "In Between Days" by The Cure

LIGHTNING ROUND DAY 9.

I'd have to class myself as a relative latecomer to true appreciation of The Cure. In my early days of musical exploration I tended to be dismissive of image-heavy bands, and at the time The Cure were really hitting my consciousness I was much more enamored of American underground music, at least on the rock band side of things-- the Sonic Youths and Hüsker Düs and R.E.M.s-- so the British bands which would, bizarrely to me and (and I can't emphasize this enough) much later be thought of as founders of the "goth" movement struck me as a bit silly and lightweight (in addition to paling, as it's hard not to do, in comparison to the likes of contemporaries like Echo & the Bunnymen and Joy Division) . Within a few years, though, I got over a lot of that prejudice in general, and specifically came to think of The Cure as one of the greatest singles bands of all time; it's only much more recently that I've come to appreciate their earlier album output as much as I always should have.

This performance is tossed off even by 39-40 Lightning Round standards. It came to be quite by accident during a stint in West Virginia when I accidentally booked a show at a Christian ice cream shop with some guys who were fixing my parents' air conditioning, resulting in a show that the always righteous Laura Whitmore would later correctly describe as positively David Lynchian. Somehow, on less than a day's notice, I managed to corral Heckman into showing up in Keyser and sharing the bill with me; I'm fairly sure that was the first of what have now become our traditional seat-of-the-pants Keyser musical collaborations. Trying to whack a set list together via e-mail, we both decided we wanted to do this tune. As I was practicing it, my dad mentioned that it sounded sort of like an Alabama tune Thunderhill used to play, and damned if it didn't. This bizarre medley now stands as a memorial to the profoundly surreal performance that folllowed.